'Smart Kalasatama' and the Role of Sompasauna: a case study of the redevelopment of Kalasatama, Helsinki

Sammanfattning: Smart city development is thriving, and many cities, including Helsinki, are engaging in the (re)development projects. Helsinki is developing toward smart city and in fact, was ranked in the top six smart cities in Europe in research published in 2014 by the European Parliament1. Especially the district of Kalasatama is currently under a significant smart-redevelopment project. Because these massive changes shape our cities and affect the people living in them, there is a need to examine the effects. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is first to investigate the characteristic of a smart city in the case of the Smart Kalasatama project and its desired spaces, entailing the role of the citizens in a smart city. Secondly, the already existing common space in the waterfront area of Kalasatama, Sompasauna is scrutinised; Sompasauna is an open public sauna built and self-governed by the citizens. At present, Sompasauna appears to be an anomaly within urban planning, perhaps even an undesired space in the neoliberal logic. This thesis considers that neoliberalism in regard to planning can be seen as the belief in the superiority of market mechanisms to organise land use (Baeten, 2018). Thus, the thesis addresses the role of the unplanned public space in a smart city with the method of discourse analysis. By combining the aspects of Smart Kalasatama and Sompasauna, the aim is furthermore to investigate how the expanding growth of smart cities affects the common spaces, especially those built and governed from below, and what kind of role, if any, do these possibly undesired spaces have in the smart city vision. For these purposes, by using neoliberal theory and Mary Douglas’s analytical instrument of impurity as matter out of place, I advance by analysing the connections and interweaving of global neoliberal rationality and contemporary urban planning regarding smart cities. With the analytical tool around dirt as a matter of the existing classification system and order, I further my analysis by examining if Sompasauna appears as a matter out of place due to the neoliberal condition.